meeting the bellcat

this morning, as i gradually emerged from layers of sleep, i caught a glimpse of my first ever Bellcat.

suspended in sparkling crystal-blue water, the Bellcat had the sleek, cartoony face of a black cat with large, slowly blinking eyes and pointy ears which shifted every few milliseconds towards some sound which i could not hear. its slender neck tapered into the sinuous body of an eel, mostly black but flecked with bits of brown and red and pockmark scars which glittered in the underwater light. its tail flitted about ever so slightly in the slow-moving mass of water which surrounded it, as if the twitching movement were keeping it fixed in one place. i stared at the Bellcat as i continued my ascent towards wakefulness, unsure of what i was looking at while somehow intuitively knowing its name, and it simply stared back at me, blinking and expressionless all the while.

I continued to think every so often about the Bellcat as i went about my morning routine: what was it thinking about as it stared at me, so composed and serene? what was the life of a Bellcat like? i tried to imagine spending a whole lifetime underwater with the combined powers of a cat’s supernatural hearing and an eel’s acute sense of vibration. could it feel the waves created from a container ship hundreds of nautical miles away? had it ever experienced the first rumblings of an earthquake bursting forth from the ocean floor, long before any humans could know what was happening? and most importantly: had it ever seen a humpback whale up close?

while i am quite familiar with the personality and desires of cats from sharing my home with two tabbies, i know almost nothing about eels except for these meager breadcrumbs:

1. my dad enjoyed eating eel, calling it a delicacy which warms and detoxifies the blood. i’ve never tasted eel myself but i remember watching my brother try it at the dinner table once when he was probably in his mid-twenties and i was around six. he closed his eyes and made a face and told me afterwards that it was slimy, but all i could picture on that cold winter evening was the tingling warmth rushing into his fingers and toes, millions of tiny electric eels wriggling their way through his blood vessels.

2. there was a recent study which used satellite tags to track the location of European eels (or Anguilla anguilla, a more romantic name if you ask me) as they migrated the last ~2500 km leg of their journey to the Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic in order to spawn. given the pace of their migration it is believed that the juvenile eels swam in a way which both conserved energy and provided enough time for their reproductive organs to fully mature, arriving two spawning periods after the onset of their journey (instead of rushing to spawn as quickly as possible).

of course, who am I to assume that the Bellcat is equal parts cat and eel and not an entirely different species altogether, wanting nothing to do with either cats or eels? there is only one way to find out: i must find a way to meet the Bellcat again in an upcoming dream, and ask it my questions personally!

midjourney prompt: “an underwater animal with a cartoonish black cat's head and the lower body of an eel. it is swimming vertically and surrounded by crystal blue waters --v 4”

(to be continued, maybe…)